"Support the troops"

I may be wrong, maybe I should ask some troops? But to me, when someone says they support the troops but disagree with the conflict in which the troops are deployed, then that is kind of a back handed support.
I mean, "support the troops" is kind of vague, what are we talking about? If "I support the troops" means "I don't want them to get killed", then that is not exactly a compassionate position, is it? I mean that should probably be universally adoptable?
I have seen lots of those signs that say, "support our troops, bring them home" and I think....wait a minute-who could disagree with that? I mean, I have had friends deployed and I sure wanted them to come home, as soon as possible, safely. I believe that the job they were called to do is important, and necessary, and I want them to go do it, and come home safe.
I believe that Senator Dick Durbin would claim until he's blue in the face that he supports our troops and yet he said this: "If I read this to you and did not tell you that it was an FBI agent describing what Americans had done to prisoners in their control, you would most certainly believe this must have been done by Nazis, Soviets in their gulags, or some mad regime--Pol Pot or others--that had no concern for human beings. Sadly, that is not the case. This was the action of Americans in the treatment of their prisoners."

So he supports the troops except when he is comparing them to the SS, or other war criminals.

But then he "apologized" by saying: "Some may believe that my remarks crossed the line," the Washington Post quotes the Senate's No. 2 Democrat as saying. "To them I extend my heartfelt apologies."
He also says, "This administration should apologize to the American people for abandoning the Geneva Conventions."
In truth, it isn't the Bush administration that is abandoning the Geneva Conventions. It is the critics, such as Amnesty International, who insist that terrorists should be protected under the conventions as if they were legitimate soldiers or civilians. The purpose of the Geneva Conventions is not to protect combatants' "human rights" but to spell out the rules of war, rules that impose reciprocal obligations on both sides of a conflict.
A central reason for those rules is to protect civilians by declaring that they are not legitimate targets of military action. Combatants who pose as civilians (i.e., do not wear uniforms) or who target civilians are spies and terrorists respectively and are not entitled to protection as prisoners of war. Indeed, Durbin acknowledged in his Senate speech that "the Geneva Conventions do not give POW status to terrorists."